E-mail management is commonly handled by ISPs that have user/subscribers or by companies which employs the e-mail users. A part of e-mail management comprises filtering for spam or virus control, but when such e-mail management is performed at the ISP or at the company server location, valuable communications bandwidth and computing resources are expended on routing, analyzing, and other handling of spurious e-mail traffic. Present e-mail management systems are further characterized by a lack of real-time monitoring, feedback, and updating of rules regarding e-mail traffic or SMTP connection situations. Management and monitoring of e-mail traffic situations is commonly handled through human intervention.
Other present systems for blocking spam or viruses include systems that populate decoy email addresses around the Internet, where the decoy email addresses act as spam collectors. Human editors then review the messages that come in, catalog them, and create a database of such junk-mail messages and their checksums. The created database is then promulgated to subscribers of the service, and each message received at the customer premises is checked against the virus/spam database. Again, in this instance, the detection and monitoring of the Internet for new virus and spam messages is not in real time, and the customer premise mail server must still receive all of the spurious e-mails and then analyze all the incoming emails to see whether there is a match in the database.
In other words, prior-art approaches do not provide for immediate detection of spam and viruses before signatures of such spam and viruses are added to databases, and instead require reference to a database of junk-mail messages and/or their checksums, and neither do prior-art approaches provide for this immediate detection of spam and viruses before they are received at the customer premise mail server.